Over the last twenty years there has been an explosion of theoretical literature concerning the body and embodiment, spanning a range of disciplines including sociology, anthropology, psychology, feminism and geography. The potential of these theoretical insights to the essentially ‘body-based’ practice of nursing is therefore highly significant. However, with a few notable exceptions, theoretical and empirical investigation of the body in nursing has remained largely neglected.
So, despite the everyday primacy of ‘the body’ in nursing, its presence is strangely absent. My inaugural lecture will explore this paradox, interrogating the various sources of authoritative knowledge and how, through a process of embodied engagement, we might bring bodies back into nursing.
Monday 14 June, 4pm,
Berrill Lecture Theatre
Tea/Coffee served in the Reception Area
from 3.30pm
Buffet Reception afterwards in the Berrill Café Bar
Jan Draper is Professor and Head of Nursing at The Open University. Following a clinical background in adult nursing, she moved into higher education in the late 1980s. For the last nine years this has been in the field of distance learning, developing and delivering high quality, flexible, work-based learning solutions for the nursing and healthcare workforce. Fundamental to this is a desire that education should make an impact on practice and her education and scholarship activity is predicated on this one, central aim.
